Reading C.S.: The Screwtape Letters
July 25th, 2007 | by Scott |I don’t really know what I can say about this work that hasn’t already been said. I’m not really sure if anybody is reading these post about Lewis’ works anyway.
Surely, while I don’t think it is Lewis’ best work by a country mile, it is among his best known and loved. It was published in 1942 as a series of 31 letters written by one demon, Screwtape, to his pupil and rookie tempter, Wormwood. The works actually began appearing in 1941 as individual entries in The Guardian. Lewis was paid 2 pounds per letter by the newspaper that he had donated to war widows.
Although the book is short, I think a reader does a disservice if he reads through them quickly as i did this time around. Each letter is rich in content with a probing insight to the nature and corruption of man as well as the lure of temptation.
Screwtape proposes to Wormwood a series of sins and temptations to seduce and entice his “patient.” The depth of understanding of that Lewis displays of the inner workings of the mind and the lusts that plague us all is staggering.
Lewis never ceases to engage. I don’t always agree with his conclusions but I can’t help but be intrigued by his arguments as mired in modernity as it might be.
Some excerpts and morsels:
Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s (God’s) will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
In modern Christian writings, though I see much (indeed more than I like) about Mammon, I see few of the old warnings about Worldly Vanities, the Choice of Friends, and the Value of Time. All that, your patient would probably classify as “Puritanism”–and may I remark in passing that the value we have given to that word is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years? By it we rescue annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life.
…the parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires. The congregational principal, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction.
Again, I find myself disagreeing with Lewis from time to time. In this book I most took issue with his dismissal of pacifism and historicism. However, every Christian should read this book at some point or another. Grade: A